Island of Beaches and Barnyards
A roadtrip aroundPrince Edward Island
How am I already at PEI? My friend asks at the same time I wondered myself during a breif stop for wifi. I didn’t speed through New Brunswick but neither did I dilly dally. Sure, I was moderately fast but I didn’t expect to circumnavigate the bottom three quarters of the province in five days. I think the speed is because I’m travelling alone. I drive some and then stop. Then I drive some more.
The thing with travelling alone is that you’re never waiting on anyone. Conversely, you never have much of a reason to stay anywhere. Once you’ve walked a beach and sat on the grass day dreaming there’s not much to do but get up and continue on. There’s no one to play in the water or decide that more time is needed sun tanning to the point that you nap and loose track of time. Instead, you arrive, take some photos, soak in the moment briefly and then leave. Time is always a familiar companion that subtly reminds you to keep moving, keep going on. To what? I have yet to discover.
I was estatic to reach the Confederation bridge linking PEI to New Brunswick. Built in 1997 it is a marvel of civil engineering and I’ve wanted to cross it since I saw a documentary on the Discovery Channel as a kid.
The New Brunswick side has a wildlife area with a pretty good vantage point of the bridge and there’s also a short trail to a lighthouse. I was caught off guard when a Quebec woman asked if I spoke French and then asked how far to the lighthouse. I was sort of able to reply, though I didn’t know the word for lighthouse (it’s phare). It hadn’t occurred to me how much French there would be in the maritimes but depending on the region is very easy to drive through Acadia and meet the decedents of the French colonist who still hang a French flag with a gold star outside their house. She was a tourist from Quebec but that she didn’t judge me by my skin colour was very welcome.
The Confederation bridge is so named because the founding fathers of what would eventually become the Dominion of Canada met first in Charlottetown between September 1 through to 9, 1864. The original intent was as a meeting of representatives from the Maritime colonies of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island to form a union which Britian hoped would become economically and politically less dependent and provide a greater power to diswade advance after the American Civil War. When the province of Canada, consisting of Ontario and Quebec found out, they asked to join and lay the groundwork for a dominion of Canada.
At the same visitor centre I also found out via the free wifi that my graduate thesis project had been featured on Dezeen, a prominent design magazine and website.
I didn’t realize how small PEI is and I made a concerted effort to slow down. Otherwise I’d end up driving the island in no time. That slow down started with hanging out at a park on the PEI side of the Confederation bridge for the afternoon and then meandering my way to a light house to camp for the night. The next morning, I awoke fine but when I went to check out a nearby historic site I found that I didn’t feel well. Something from the day before, probably the lobster roll I had for dinner, gave me food poisoning.
So for the new few days I rolled around in misery. I tried to spend some time in Charlottetown, using the afternoon to get wifi in the library, and strolling the historic downtown in the evening but I really didn’t feel well. About 5–6 days previous when I’d entered New Brunswick I’d also given myself an upset stomach from some sausages I cooked insufficiently. It would seem that food was becoming a difficult hurdle to overcome and I swore that I would no longer use my cooler for perishable food storage and instead buy cheap fast-food for meals or buy non-perishable goods.
Despite my uneasy stomach I did manage to continue on the East Coast Scenic drive and found a wonderful beach at Stewart Point. PEI is surrounded by either beaches of red sandstone headlands and so there are a lot of beaches to choose from, especially on the eastern side of the island. I think a lot of people gravitate to the provincial parks probably because they’re free and have facilities but they’re not always the best. Stewart Point, in my opinion is a great beach at the end of an unmarked dirt road. There are some rocky areas but for the most part it’s a shallow grade of soft sand and warm water as the tide goes out. Most importantly, it’s uncrowded and I saw just four other people.
PEI is also a really good place to camp. The provincial parks are full of RVs and long trailers that are probably parked for a week with the kids playing on the beach and the dads BBQing hotdogs but there are also many lighthouses and headlands that make for fantastic wilderness campsites. Just 30 minutes outside Charlottetown was a lighthouse that I stayed at for two nights and then to the east was an empty headland. The north cape has a lighthouse with plenty of space to camp as does Cape Egmont.
Other more touristic lighthouses are open to as museums to walk the grounds and some are open inside to visit for around $5. The Point Prim lighthouse is the oldest on the island and I climbed that to see the view from top. I did the same at East Point as well.
After Visiting Prim lighthouse I stopped at a bottle village. Someone had built a whole bunch of mud buildings in their backyard with bottles inserted into the walls. It was a small tourist attraction with donations going to the children’s hopsital.
I couldn’t tell why some beaches would be better than the less crowded ones I enjoyed but I suspect it’s that these beaches just ended up on a magazine or something and so everyone gravitated to them without the tourists knowing about the next beach over being empty.
Tyne Heads is a good example. It has a really cool channel that kids jump in and ride the rip tide through but for everyone else playing on the beach, it’s not crowded but there are people. One beach over down an unmarked road is Singing Sands. The high silica content makes “burrring” noises as you walk on it.
My trip through PEI was a circumnavigation counter clockwise along the coast drives and I hit the south, east, north, and west tips of the island. Many of the scenic byways were empty and I spent long stretches of the drive barely seeing anyone else. This was preferable and a relaxing time. The one exception was the north central section near the national parks and the Confederation bridge. This seems to be the hotspot and a number of well known beaches attract many tourist. It’s also where I nearly lost a windshield when an overloaded dump truck tossed rocks at me. One larger than my fist launched itself at my car and slammed into my roof causing a large dent.
On the flip side, the National Park area was nice because it had two good scenic drives along the coast as was the fashionable when the park was established in the mid 20th century. Included were a number of pullouts with scenic views.
There is also a well maintained bike path beside the road that would make for a good cruise and forest paths for kids to bike in too.
PEI has a historic fishing industry and there are many little community harbours that are called out along the scenic route to stop at. The largest and most photogenic in my opinion was at North Lake. I don’t think I quite captured the community atmosphere of the location but I did really enjoy walking among the colourful sheds stacked with lobster traps. The boats in the harbour were very photogenic and also working. While I was taking pictures one came in to dock and unload.
PEI also had a history of large forests and forestry, though that was mostly during the pioneering era. Since then the lands been pretty well cleared for farming and all that remains are a few new growth patches. If the land isn’t a farm field, of which there are plenty of wheat fields and potato factories, there is a surprisingly strong attachment to lawns. I passed many homestead houses perched on a hill or at the long end of a seaside property with nothing in between the road and the house but a vast lawn. It was so common that I became accustomed to waving at middle aged men astride their lawnmower as I passed by. Maybe this is what they consider a good pastime: driving round in circles on a buggy in their yard shaving turf.
Occasionally I would round the bed and see an overly large farm machine lumbering down the road. With wheels taller than my car and a gait that spreads beyond the car lane, these mighty beasts deserve a distant respect. But they’re also fascinating to see. The island has so many farms that most have embraced the technological marvels of the 21st century and adopted all manner of tractor. I couldn’t identify one from the next but they all seemed more than capable.
I spent more time in PEI than I expected for such a small geographic area but there’s a lot to see in terms of lighthouses and headlands as well as beaches to play on. I found the east coast drive the most scenic with the best way finding and most interesting beaches. The central Green Gables drive was too crowded for me, though I did enjoy camping at the national park. By far the least developed with the least to see was the North Cape. I kinda went just to complete the loop and for FOMO sake but there really wasn’t much of anything on that side of the island that wasn’t better or more interesting in the east.
Wilderness camping was easy and despite the rough go. By far the best was the last stop, Cape Egmont where I arrived just in time to see a fantastic sunset over the gulf. A camp trailer was parked on the tip and a few people came to see the sunset too but they added well to the photographs.
On the other side of the cape was an arched portal in a sea stack. In the morning it would be covered in black comorants but for now it meerly glowed in the evening twilight.
I enjoyed my time on the beaches and driving around the country side seeing homesteads and fishing shacks. I took note of the architecture and tried my best to visit every interesting looking feature on the map. I probably skipped over most of them because although it is small, PEI has a lot to offer.
